Asking for exceptions for book publishers in the name of Culture is like asking for exceptions for high furnaces in the name of Chillida.﻿

sábado, 31 de enero de 2015

640Kb should be enough for anyone...

Apparently, some 40 years after Bill Gates said that, some people still believe it.
Someone wrote the following comment at Author Earning's Feb'14 report (one of them, this is):

First, that even if Indies represent a big percentage of Amazon’s revenues, revenues is not the same as earnings. There are thousands of indie authors that haven’t sold a single book, (actually, I am one of them…) and they represent a huge cost for Amazon, like server space, bandwidth or help desk support.

Fascinating. One of my ebook collections has some 500 books. Taking crude data from there, it needs some 350 Mb. A tad more if you go into operating systems and filesystems and technicalities, sure. But the fact is that I could put a hundred times my library in my oldish iPad and it would fit. Or in a 32 Gb photographer's card. At about 50€ (end-user price) a terabyte, that's 50¢ the gigabyte. For less than 15 cents I can store the whole collection in a hard drive.
Bandwidth? About par, and mostly only if someone actually buys it. For the rest... about the same bandwidth it costs Amazon that anyone browses a product. Help desk support might be an item, though. Still...
People... Computing, really. It's been there for most our lives, at this stage. Get a grip.
Take care.